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Designing San Francisco: Art, Land, and Urban Renewal in the City by the Bay
A major new urban history of the design and development of postwar San Francisco
Designing San Francisco is the untold story of the formative postwar decades when U.S. cities took their modern shape amid clashing visions of the future. In this pathbreaking and richly illustrated book, Alison Isenberg shifts the focus from architects and city planners―those most often hailed in histories of urban development and design―to the unsung artists, activists, and others who played pivotal roles in rebuilding San Francisco between the 1940s and the 1970s.
Previous accounts of midcentury urban renewal have focused on the opposing terms set down by Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs―put simply, development versus preservation―and have followed New York City models. Now Isenberg turns our attention west to colorful, pioneering, and contentious San Francisco, where unexpectedly fierce battles were waged over iconic private and public projects like Ghirardelli Square, Golden Gateway, and the Transamerica Pyramid.
When large-scale redevelopment came to low-rise San Francisco in the 1950s, the resulting rivalries and conflicts sparked the proliferation of numerous allied arts fields and their professionals, including architectural model makers, real estate publicists, graphic designers, photographers, property managers, builders, sculptors, public-interest lawyers, alternative press writers, and preservationists. Isenberg explores how these centrally engaged arts professionals brought new ideas to city, regional, and national planning and shaped novel projects across urban, suburban, and rural borders. San Francisco’s rebuilding galvanized far-reaching critiques of the inequitable competition for scarce urban land, and propelled debates over responsible public land stewardship. Isenberg challenges many truisms of this renewal era―especially the presumed male domination of postwar urban design, showing how women collaborated in city building long before feminism’s impact in the 1970s.
An evocative portrait of one of the world’s great cities, Designing San Francisco provides a new paradigm for understanding past and present struggles to define the urban future.
Designing San Francisco is the untold story of the formative postwar decades when U.S. cities took their modern shape amid clashing visions of the future. In this pathbreaking and richly illustrated book, Alison Isenberg shifts the focus from architects and city planners―those most often hailed in histories of urban development and design―to the unsung artists, activists, and others who played pivotal roles in rebuilding San Francisco between the 1940s and the 1970s.
Previous accounts of midcentury urban renewal have focused on the opposing terms set down by Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs―put simply, development versus preservation―and have followed New York City models. Now Isenberg turns our attention west to colorful, pioneering, and contentious San Francisco, where unexpectedly fierce battles were waged over iconic private and public projects like Ghirardelli Square, Golden Gateway, and the Transamerica Pyramid.
When large-scale redevelopment came to low-rise San Francisco in the 1950s, the resulting rivalries and conflicts sparked the proliferation of numerous allied arts fields and their professionals, including architectural model makers, real estate publicists, graphic designers, photographers, property managers, builders, sculptors, public-interest lawyers, alternative press writers, and preservationists. Isenberg explores how these centrally engaged arts professionals brought new ideas to city, regional, and national planning and shaped novel projects across urban, suburban, and rural borders. San Francisco’s rebuilding galvanized far-reaching critiques of the inequitable competition for scarce urban land, and propelled debates over responsible public land stewardship. Isenberg challenges many truisms of this renewal era―especially the presumed male domination of postwar urban design, showing how women collaborated in city building long before feminism’s impact in the 1970s.
An evocative portrait of one of the world’s great cities, Designing San Francisco provides a new paradigm for understanding past and present struggles to define the urban future.
432 pages, Hardcover
Published August 29, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 28, 2019
This was a really interesting look at how San Francisco became the city it us today, with a lens on the key people (particularly husband and wife teams) who shaped preservation and urban renewal in the City. The book focused particularly on the Ghirardelli Square, The Embarcadero Center, and the Transamerica Building. It changed my context of understanding the land battles (and giveaways) that shaped the modern downtown, and a different outlook on how law suites have prevailed to force the cities hand due to past dealings which essentially gave away large parts of the cities public lands to for profit developers. I slowed down reading it, but would highly recommend it.
January 21, 2021
I'm of two very different minds with this book, if I could some how give it 1 star and 5 stars I would.
The interior of the book is great, chapters 3-8 in particular and to some degree chapter 9. I loved learning about the work of Virginia Green and Leila Johnston, Marion Conrad, Bobby Stauffacher and Caree and Stuart Rose. It was really refreshing to hear about all of the important work the architects of the built world do. They produced some great and very interesting work and this job does a fantastic and very well researched job of telling their stories. Also through out the book the quality of research and archival work is top notch.
On the other hand, the first and last few chapters made my skin crawl. In particular Jean and Karl Kortum who strike me as super arch villains and the absolute worst kind of NIMBY - "I like old sailing ships, the superficial romance of the gold rush and short buildings, therefore there should be absolutely no growth of any kind in anywhere". Ditto for the various NIMBY lawyers of the street vacation lawsuits. These chapters (and other parts of the book) constantly and without any critical questioning describe any building over 4 stores as "looming" and "monolithic" and same thing for any new construction in general which is always "monolithic." The book constantly repeats that the NIMBYs of SF were not "obstructionists" even though every single thing described in the book is them being obstructionists. The question of public land stewardship is an extremely interesting and important one, but Jean and Karl Kortum and the NIMBYs of the world will weaponize anything, including this question, in order to stop growth of all forms.
I'm glad I read this book and will recommend it to others, I learned a lot and I loved all the sections on outsiders in the design/building professions. Even the bookend chapters were helpful to understand the logic of NIMBYs and no growth people and how they justify their deep deep selfishness as working for "the public good."
The interior of the book is great, chapters 3-8 in particular and to some degree chapter 9. I loved learning about the work of Virginia Green and Leila Johnston, Marion Conrad, Bobby Stauffacher and Caree and Stuart Rose. It was really refreshing to hear about all of the important work the architects of the built world do. They produced some great and very interesting work and this job does a fantastic and very well researched job of telling their stories. Also through out the book the quality of research and archival work is top notch.
On the other hand, the first and last few chapters made my skin crawl. In particular Jean and Karl Kortum who strike me as super arch villains and the absolute worst kind of NIMBY - "I like old sailing ships, the superficial romance of the gold rush and short buildings, therefore there should be absolutely no growth of any kind in anywhere". Ditto for the various NIMBY lawyers of the street vacation lawsuits. These chapters (and other parts of the book) constantly and without any critical questioning describe any building over 4 stores as "looming" and "monolithic" and same thing for any new construction in general which is always "monolithic." The book constantly repeats that the NIMBYs of SF were not "obstructionists" even though every single thing described in the book is them being obstructionists. The question of public land stewardship is an extremely interesting and important one, but Jean and Karl Kortum and the NIMBYs of the world will weaponize anything, including this question, in order to stop growth of all forms.
I'm glad I read this book and will recommend it to others, I learned a lot and I loved all the sections on outsiders in the design/building professions. Even the bookend chapters were helpful to understand the logic of NIMBYs and no growth people and how they justify their deep deep selfishness as working for "the public good."
April 30, 2018
A curious book. On the one hand a meticulously researched and beautifully illustrated recovery of a particular period in the (re)development of San Francisco, focused above all on the redevelopment of Ghiradelli Square in the 1960s, with a focus above all on the designers and architects and artisans (such as illustrators, graphic designers, and model makers) who were involved in the issues at the time. On the other hand, while the author is clearly very aware of the political controversies that swirled around redevelopment at the time, she redirects our attention away from the politically charged than other things that were going on at the time, including slum clearances in the Western Addition, the freeway revolts, the Golden Gateway apartments, and the construction of the Embarcadero Center with its threat of “Manhattanization.”
The latter is not to say that the book is without its quiet politics. The most interesting chapter, to me, was the one on the import of 3D scale models — traditionally regarded as a “derivative” art, simply the vision of the architects, and with less prestige than 2D renderings, which fell within a Western artistic tradition of landscape painting and came trailing with a history of criticism. She points out that these scale models were usually done by firms often run by women, and were often extremely expensive. Likewise she points to the important of graphic design workers (also largely women) in generating sites like Ghiradelli Square and also the planned north Sonoma coast community of The Sea Ranch. The golden thread that runs through the book is its emphasis on the role of women.
Even more curious about the book is that it also delivers no judgment about the quality of redevelopment projects like Ghiradelli Square. Ultimately, from my own perspective, the place seems rather commercially boring. Framing it as a different path than the antiquarian preservationist bent, versus the “tear it all down and build skyscrapers” approaches, she instead suggests that the style of redevelopment embodied by Ghiradelli Square owed a great deal to the kind of commercial development which was exploding in malls across the suburbs of postwar America. She shows that one couple, led by the wife Marion Conrad, was especially important in importing design and commercial instincts originally honed in the commercial development of Sausalito in the 1950s in to the redevelopment of Ghiradelli Square. And she shows that another woman, Bobbie Stauffacher, was essential to bringing Helvetica font and “Supertype” style building graphics from Europe to San Francisco (and attacking Clarendon “cuteness”), informing the look at Ghiradelli Square, and at The Sea Ranch. And she spends a whole chapter talking about the controversy over Ruth Asawa’s nursing mermaid sculpture.
OK, well, it’s great to show these links (which have been forgotten), and it’s nice that these interventions were led by dynamic professional women (which Isenberg implicitly and perhaps correctly argues may by WHY these episodes have been forgotten), but this decision to focus on an alternative history avoids discussing something essential about these projects. Specifically, you’d never know from this history that in both Ghiradelli Square and Sausalito it produced tawdry commercialist tourist traps that are largely avoided by the people who actually live in these cities. (And you’d never get a sense for why Sea Ranch doesn’t suffer the same fate — perhaps because it eventually ditched a lot of Stauffacher’s design elements?) It’s a bit like telling the story of the Titanic without ever quite getting around to mentioning that the thing ultimately sank.
I mean, OK: let’s not focus on the racial politics of the slum clearances in the Western Addition, let’s look away from the traditional focus of 1960s historians of San Francisco on the burgeoning counterculture, and let’s instead celebrate the work of professional women which has suffered historical erasure. And let’s also emphasize that the distinctions between urban, suburban, and rural development patterns have more continuities than usually appreciated That’s all fine. But surely that doesn’t absolve us from assessing whether the work itself was ultimately a good or bad contribution to the urban fabrics of the city? At some point I wanted Isenberg to offer us a judgment: did scale model- or graphic design-driven approaches represent a better or worse way (by some standard, such as inclusiveness) to present plans for redevelopment to a community? Whose political and economic interests did such representations serve? Did they result in better or worse outcomes, aesthetically or otherwise?
The latter is not to say that the book is without its quiet politics. The most interesting chapter, to me, was the one on the import of 3D scale models — traditionally regarded as a “derivative” art, simply the vision of the architects, and with less prestige than 2D renderings, which fell within a Western artistic tradition of landscape painting and came trailing with a history of criticism. She points out that these scale models were usually done by firms often run by women, and were often extremely expensive. Likewise she points to the important of graphic design workers (also largely women) in generating sites like Ghiradelli Square and also the planned north Sonoma coast community of The Sea Ranch. The golden thread that runs through the book is its emphasis on the role of women.
Even more curious about the book is that it also delivers no judgment about the quality of redevelopment projects like Ghiradelli Square. Ultimately, from my own perspective, the place seems rather commercially boring. Framing it as a different path than the antiquarian preservationist bent, versus the “tear it all down and build skyscrapers” approaches, she instead suggests that the style of redevelopment embodied by Ghiradelli Square owed a great deal to the kind of commercial development which was exploding in malls across the suburbs of postwar America. She shows that one couple, led by the wife Marion Conrad, was especially important in importing design and commercial instincts originally honed in the commercial development of Sausalito in the 1950s in to the redevelopment of Ghiradelli Square. And she shows that another woman, Bobbie Stauffacher, was essential to bringing Helvetica font and “Supertype” style building graphics from Europe to San Francisco (and attacking Clarendon “cuteness”), informing the look at Ghiradelli Square, and at The Sea Ranch. And she spends a whole chapter talking about the controversy over Ruth Asawa’s nursing mermaid sculpture.
OK, well, it’s great to show these links (which have been forgotten), and it’s nice that these interventions were led by dynamic professional women (which Isenberg implicitly and perhaps correctly argues may by WHY these episodes have been forgotten), but this decision to focus on an alternative history avoids discussing something essential about these projects. Specifically, you’d never know from this history that in both Ghiradelli Square and Sausalito it produced tawdry commercialist tourist traps that are largely avoided by the people who actually live in these cities. (And you’d never get a sense for why Sea Ranch doesn’t suffer the same fate — perhaps because it eventually ditched a lot of Stauffacher’s design elements?) It’s a bit like telling the story of the Titanic without ever quite getting around to mentioning that the thing ultimately sank.
I mean, OK: let’s not focus on the racial politics of the slum clearances in the Western Addition, let’s look away from the traditional focus of 1960s historians of San Francisco on the burgeoning counterculture, and let’s instead celebrate the work of professional women which has suffered historical erasure. And let’s also emphasize that the distinctions between urban, suburban, and rural development patterns have more continuities than usually appreciated That’s all fine. But surely that doesn’t absolve us from assessing whether the work itself was ultimately a good or bad contribution to the urban fabrics of the city? At some point I wanted Isenberg to offer us a judgment: did scale model- or graphic design-driven approaches represent a better or worse way (by some standard, such as inclusiveness) to present plans for redevelopment to a community? Whose political and economic interests did such representations serve? Did they result in better or worse outcomes, aesthetically or otherwise?
March 26, 2020
This is a tough book for me to assess. On the one hand, it added some real and interesting depth to parts of the city’s development I knew less about, especially around some parts of the waterfront. It also fleshed out some very interesting characters, with a focus on women, which is too rare. And perhaps most intriguingly it tried to articulate a very interesting thesis about how design and non-design disciplines worked together to build modern SF.
But ultimately I found the thesis ill-supported, or maybe ill-articulated, or both - even while reading it, and certainly afterward, I could not quite concisely capture what the author was trying to say, and it’s hard to say the evidence (rather than the artfully-chosen anecdote) actually supported it in anything but the most obvious way. (Yes, PR people were involved! Activists were involved!) So hard for me to love the book as much as I wanted to.
But ultimately I found the thesis ill-supported, or maybe ill-articulated, or both - even while reading it, and certainly afterward, I could not quite concisely capture what the author was trying to say, and it’s hard to say the evidence (rather than the artfully-chosen anecdote) actually supported it in anything but the most obvious way. (Yes, PR people were involved! Activists were involved!) So hard for me to love the book as much as I wanted to.
February 3, 2024
Wanted to like this book more than I did - it was clearly well researched but I didn't leave with many concrete takeaways.
Isenberg did a good job exploring complex local figures like Karl & Jean Kortum, Barbara Stauffacher, Marion Conrad etc, highlighting the prominence of women especially, but many of the urban renewal conflicts explored felt low-stakes. Much focus was given to projects like Ghirardelli Square or Village Fair in Sausalito and the various aesthetic and preservationist controversies they generated, but ultimately their legacy are as tourist traps.
Perhaps because of the lack of design involvement, the book makes scant mention of the urban redevelopment & uprooting of Western Addition, Yerba Buena, or even Manilatown, situated next to many of the other projects mentioned in the book. I would have liked to read more about these projects because of their much more tangible human effects and their lasting legacies on the composition of the city today.
Isenberg did a good job exploring complex local figures like Karl & Jean Kortum, Barbara Stauffacher, Marion Conrad etc, highlighting the prominence of women especially, but many of the urban renewal conflicts explored felt low-stakes. Much focus was given to projects like Ghirardelli Square or Village Fair in Sausalito and the various aesthetic and preservationist controversies they generated, but ultimately their legacy are as tourist traps.
Perhaps because of the lack of design involvement, the book makes scant mention of the urban redevelopment & uprooting of Western Addition, Yerba Buena, or even Manilatown, situated next to many of the other projects mentioned in the book. I would have liked to read more about these projects because of their much more tangible human effects and their lasting legacies on the composition of the city today.
January 13, 2024
Great coffee table book with an excellent story dovetailing from the usual New Urbanist story of William Whyte, Jane Jacobs, and Robert Moses. Highlights a number of individuals, notably Vic Bergeron, who were instrumental in creating the aesthetics of the San Francisco we know from 1980-2011. Beautiful visual elements contributed a powerful shift in perspective on the most beautiful city I have ever lived in.
Three stars for providing lucid depth on an interesting topic. Did not teach fundamentally new ways of thinking, but will certainly reference and recommend in future conversations.
Three stars for providing lucid depth on an interesting topic. Did not teach fundamentally new ways of thinking, but will certainly reference and recommend in future conversations.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews